Vampire Miami (11 page)

“Bastards,” she said in a strangled whisper. Her
eyes stung, and she realized she was sitting stiffly upright.

“What’s wrong?” asked Tim. She ignored him. Her
friends had left a number of concerned messages hovering over the
concrete ground of her Garden, and she saw that Jairo had already
laid down grass over a quarter of the space. A tentative offering.
She couldn’t believe it. This was her
Garden
. This was her
most cherished and sacred space. Where she communed with her best
friends, where she posted the essence of her self. And her Shrine.
Just gone. Gone.

Selah looked up, breathing quickly. She was
going to kill them. That weasel-faced guy at the club. It must have
been him. She quickly dove back in, ignoring Tim. Opened a hanging
banner in midair, and wrote:

I am alive and well. The bastards who did this
are going to pay.

Messages blinked into existence, people noticing
that she was online and trying to ping her, open lines of
communication. She couldn’t answer them, not now, not here. She
realized she couldn’t take looking at her ruined home any longer,
and was about to log out when a connection window opened up in
midair by itself.

Selah blinked. That shouldn’t happen. Couldn’t
happen. She had to accept an incoming message before it activated.
She peered at the name at the top, and saw that there wasn’t one.
That wasn’t supposed to be possible, either.

A guy’s face, about her age, light-skinned and
cautious. “Hey,” he said, “you’re Selah, right?”

Selah shot a glance at Tim. He was starting to
look really annoyed. She flashed him an apologetic grin that did
little to hide her mounting fury, and turned away from him to look
into the screen.

“Who the hell is this? What are you doing in my
Garden? Did you do all this?”

“What? No! No way. We had nothing to do with
this wipe. I just came in here to check if you’re OK.”

“Who
are
you? We? We who?”

The guy held up both hands as if to slow her
down. “Look, we all saw that video stream you piped out of Magnum.
We all saw you get grabbed, and we got worried. Then your Garden
gets wiped. We thought you’d been killed.”

“Who the hell is ‘we’? Who are you? How did you
force your way in here?”

The guy paused, a mixture of embarrassment and
pride on his face. “I’m—well, we’re here in Miami with you.” He
peered at something off-screen. “Though it looks like you’re in
Jackson Memorial embassy now. Did you get asylum?”

“No, I did
not
get asylum. Tell me who
you are or I’m logging off.”

“Ah, I don’t really want to say who I am. Erm.
It’s not safe. What we thought happened to you might happen to me
if I get traced.”

Selah blinked, sat back. Stared at the guy’s
face.
The Resistance
? “Oh. Oh! I think I understand.” She
felt a surge of excitement. “Wow. And you guys saw my feed? My
recording?”

“Hell, yeah,” said the guy. “We all did. It
received something like a couple of hundred thousand views before
the original got deleted from your Garden. But copies have already
been made and it’s still out there. Mostly because of what’s going
on between two girls on a couch to the left, but hey. You’re kind
of a star right now. People are all wondering what happened to
you.”

A star? Tim stood. “Selah, I have to go. Can I
have my Omni back?” She glanced up at him. His face had grown tight
and annoyed.

Back to the screen. “I have to go. They took my
Omni. This is somebody else’s.”

“OK. Well, we just wanted to check in and make
sure you’re safe. Nice meeting you.” The window began to close.

“Wait!” It paused, opened again. The guy looked
at her with raised eyebrows. Selah tried to phrase the wild desire
that had burst into her chest as carefully as she could. “I want to
meet you guys.” He stared at her. Unconvinced. “You said I’m a star
right now, right? Maybe I could help you somehow. Use this
attention for something.”

He thought it over and then shrugged. “I’ll have
to double-check, but yeah. Sure. We can at least meet. How about
tonight at ten? 2312 NW 2nd Ave. That work?”

Selah opened her mouth to say no, that didn’t
work, she couldn’t be out past eight, but Tim reached down and tore
the Omni from her hands. Before she could say anything, he closed
down her browser and shoved it in his pocket. “Excuse me. I have to
go back to work.”

“But—I was just—I wasn’t—”

“I’m sorry for interrupting your chat. But I
don’t want to get fired. Excuse me.” He turned and began making his
way out.

“Tim!” Selah stood up. He didn’t stop. She had
really pissed him off. She wondered how she would react if somebody
had done that with her Omni. Winced. “Hey, I’m sorry!” He kept
walking, went down the steps and out of sight.

Selah sat back down. Below, Mama B was laughing
over a loud joke, crunching down on a cracker covered in cheese or
something. Selah stared down at her. Ten p.m. She had just made
peace with her grandmother, with her new life. Resolved to start
settling down and behave. Still. Could she pass up a meeting with
the Resistance?

Selah was quiet the whole way home. She felt a
stirring uneasiness that she didn’t know how to reconcile. Watched
the city go by. It was so much more complex than she’d expected.
The shattered shells of homes, the downed telephone cables, the few
people sitting in the sunshine in their deck chairs watching cars
roll by.

When they got back, the whole building turned
out, excited to see what Mama B and Laura had brought home, calling
out their requests as they gathered in a thick crowd around the
jeep. Selah slipped away and wandered around the Palisades, peering
into apartment doorways and pondering the different people that had
been gathered here by fate to make this place their homes. She
tried to imagine the building as it had been before the war, filled
with strangers, nobody knowing their neighbor’s name. Eventually,
she returned to her room, still unsure about what she would do that
night, and passed out.

She awoke at dusk. She’d slept poorly, slicked
in sweat and without even a fan to stir the thick, humid air.
Sitting up, she felt stale, scruffy, in need of a shower. She rose,
and entered the living room. Mama B was reading a report of some
kind in her armchair, holding the papers up to the dim evening
light that filtered in through the western window, squinting as the
text disappeared into the gloom.

“What do we do about showers?”

Mama B looked at her over the rims of her narrow
glasses. “Most people swim in the Miami River when they need to
wash. That’s not too far from here, but it’s too late and we tend
to go in groups. So you’d probably best use the communal shower.
It’s right downstairs in the yard, by the drainpipe. Don’t know if
there’s any water in it right now. People usually take turns during
a storm.”

Selah grabbed some clothes, a towel, and a bar
of soap and headed downstairs. People were out and about, sitting
together in a relaxed fashion, playing cards or dominoes. She
already recognized a few faces, and returned nods stiffly, but
didn’t pause to say hi. Instead, she made her way down to the
courtyard and to the water pipe corner, skirting the goats and
staring at the dim lines of vegetables. A couple of old men were
lighting the fires in each corner of the yard, and they greeted her
sociably enough. Mama B hadn’t been kidding. The shower bag was a
bright yellow affair, suspended by nylon cords from the first floor
balcony and ringed by a shower curtain that was currently pulled
open.

“Don’t use all the water.” A young boy stared up
at her with large eyes. “I did and people got mad at me, so don’t
do it too.”

“All right,” said Selah. “I won’t.”

“It helps if you get all wet first real quick
and then stop the water. Then you can use the soap and when you are
all soapy, you can use a little water to rinse off. That’s my
method. It works.”

“OK,” said Selah. “Um, thanks.”

The little boy stared at her for awhile longer,
then let out a yell that sounded like a war cry and ran off, waving
a stick he’d held all along behind his back, rattling it along the
wall. Selah couldn’t help it—she smiled, shook her head, and turned
back to the shower.

Showering and putting on clean clothing
distracted her from making a decision, but she could put it off no
longer. What was it going to be? She felt torn; she had resolved to
learn more about Miami before pursuing her investigation, to not
make any more amateur mistakes that could get her killed. Still,
when she thought of Mama B at the embassy, surrounded by
like-minded community figures, trying to make a difference, work
with the system, she felt something within her balk. She studied
her nails and worked some dirt out from under them. The idea of all
that paperwork and talking and politics didn’t seem like the way to
go, either.

Then what? The Resistance. She thought of Cloud.
Of his eyes, burning bright with a fevered passion, his mocking
laugh. She wondered what he looked like under the scarf that always
covered his face. All anybody ever saw was his Asian eyes. Was it
possible that she might work with him? Join the Resistance? Might
they not know more about Blood Dust, the connections between
vampires and the government?

Selah stood and went to the little bookcase in
the corner of her tiny room. Three shelves. She looked at the
titles, and then snatched out a ratty book of maps.
Miami-Dade
, it read. The date was 2019. Only a couple of
years before the war. He’d told her 2312 NW 2nd Avenue. She flicked
through the pages, saw that several were missing. Checked the
index, flipped back and found it. Stared at the little squiggles,
then worked on finding the Palisades. She was about twenty-five
blocks away. Say it took her two minutes to walk a block, being
careful. That would be just under an hour. If she was careful, if
she drew no attention to herself, if she was just a little bit
lucky, she could still make it.

Without thinking it through further, she tore
out the relevant map and folded it into her jeans pocket. Grabbed
her passport and entry papers, and shoved them in her back pocket
and went out into the living room. Mama B was in the kitchen.
Silently, Selah walked over to her handbag and peered inside. The
pistol gleamed dully. Before she could change her mind, Selah took
it and slipped it under her belt at the small of her back and
dropped her jacket over it.

“Where you going?” asked Mama B in a neutral
voice.

Selah turned, heart hammering. “Going to get to
know the folks in here,” she said, the lie coming smoothly. “Be all
neighborly.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said Mama B. Her face gave nothing
away.

“Bye now,” said Selah, giving a little wave and
stepping out before anything else could be said. She hurried down
the hall, thought of trying to find Maria Elena, and quickly
discarded the idea. She hurried downstairs and into the front
lobby.
Please, let it be before eight,
she thought, over and
over again.
Please
.

It was. The door was not yet locked. Before the
two guards could say anything—Tyler and Burnel, the same guys from
last night—she skipped lightly through the lobby and out the door,
giving them the most charming smile she could, and stepped out into
the dusk.

The air was cool, for Miami, at least. The skies
above were once again filled with an orchestral arrangement of
majestic clouds, vast and epic and catching fire as the sun set.
She took a deep breath and began to walk, striding down the broad
and buckled pavement, under the palm tree where the parrots had
called so loudly that morning. They were silent now, and she
crossed the street and continued south. Memories of her wild run
the night before came back to her. She recalled her fear and
panicked elation. What a difference a night made—this time she felt
a determined calm with an undercurrent of deeper excitement. If she
had her Omni, she’d post something to her Shrine, tell only her
very best friends that
she was on her way to meet the freaking
Resistance.

She grinned. They would flip their shit.
Energized, she broke into a light jog for a few blocks and then
slowed down. No sense in drawing attention to herself. A group of
young men detached themselves from the side of a building and began
to follow her, so Selah drew her pistol and allowed it to hang by
her side as she walked on. She didn’t look back, but sensed them
slow and stop. Relief flooded her, and she bit her lip.
Careful.
For crying out loud, remember where you are.

Shadows were merging, pooling into each other,
growing velvety and menacing as the city grew dark. The rooms
behind shattered windows became ominously obscure, and a prickling
sensation between her shoulder blades made her feel as if she were
being watched.

Four men rode by on bicycles, rifles slung over
their shoulders. They were clean cut, and examined the street
around them with wary disdain.
Heading home
, thought Selah.
She almost entered a block where a long line of hungry looking
people were filing up to the back of a large truck, where two men
were handing out cartons of food and water.
One World NGO
read the logo on the truck’s side. Selah slowed, stopped, and then
turned around. No sense in walking past all those people and
drawing the wrong kind of attention.

She passed a condo building similar to the
Palisades eight blocks south, all storm-shuttered up and leaking
lights around the seams. The faint sound of voices drifted out
along with the smell of cooking food and wood smoke. Her stomach
gurgled at the rich aroma, and she immediately regretted not
grabbing something to eat before going. But, ah well. Live and
learn.